In Filmy Land, Amma shrinks MGR to squeeze Atal into frame

Film financiers used to call MGR 8216;Minimum-Guarantee Ramachandran.8217; His name sold the film. Sixteen years after the actor8217;s de...

Film financiers used to call MGR 8216;Minimum-Guarantee Ramachandran.8217; His name sold the film. Sixteen years after the actor8217;s death, the 8216;MGR Vote8217; remains Jayalalithaa8217;s core strength. But then it is a graying, declining vote. For now, Amma has found a supplement8212;8216;8216;Prathamar Vajpayee8217;8217; Prime Minister Vajpayee. It goes better with the Dravidian tongue than 8216;8216;Atalji.8217;8217;

As always in this poll-time filmy land, politics manifests visually. This time DMK has a problem though. Its poster has to accommodate one too many awesome personalities8212;from the mandatory Karunanidhi to PMK8217;s shaky Dr. Ramadoss and throw in Son Stalin without offending the volatile Vaiko.

The designer would have cursed the alliance8217;s winnable arithmetic. Friendless AIADMK, however, has ample room for display. Amma takes the pride of place and size in its publicity material and mentor MGR has been shrunk to accommodate a medium-sized 8216;8216;Prathamar.8217;8217; No Rajnikant here. The superstar makes a cameo appearance in separate posters.

On the soundtrack, MGR still reigns. A local music band blasts the daylights out of the audience waiting for Amma at Chennai8217;s Sheikh Dawood Street with vintage songs from MGR movies. You need to hold the crowd that has been sweating it out for some four hours. The off-key musical exorcism ends when the singers and the listeners have had enough. A party orator takes over and reminds the mostly Muslim crowd that it was Amma who made a Tamil Muslim the country8217;s President. Now she is giving you if not a Tamil at least a wholly Indian PM. The last word is left to the star of the show.

Jayalalithaa arrives and from the lit-up front seat of her Trekker makes her points in a signature monotone that stands out in the emotive Tamil pollscape. 8216;8216;Do you want an Italian PM or an Indian Prathamar?8217;8217;

The foreigner issue doesn8217;t seem to cut much ice with the crowd. The older lot in these parts would have heard enough of this foreigner business. Karunanidhi called MGR a Malayali foreigner, rivals called Karunanidhi a Telugu foreigner, Jayalalithaa has Karnataka origins and today nobody sees Vaiko as a less-than-Tamil Naidu.

Finally Jaya returns from Italy and departs with a message: 8216;8216;Vote for the Prathamar who8217;ll soon link rivers and give you drinking water.8217;8217; This is a surprise. Why is she highlighting an opposition-friendly poll issue that has seen more Tamil elections than she has8212;water? Has she sighted hope? The Cauvery district has had the rainiest May in two decades. Will Rain God reverse those POTA-deserving exit polls a bit? At the street corner where she spoke, the hand pumps have been dry for four years and water arrives on trucks once in two days. A ten-minute walk from here is Bay of Bengal. In TN water, like politics, remains a grand spectacle.